The mystery surrounding the crash of an Air France plane off the coast of Brazil has deepened after Brazilian officials revealed that debris pulled from the sea was not from the missing jet.
The search by ships for wreckage from Air France flight AF 477, which came down early Monday as it was flying from Rio to Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board, is continuing.
'Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered,' Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife late last night.
That contradicted a statement Brigadier Cardoso made earlier when he said a palette and two buoys plucked from the Atlantic by navy crews were the first pieces of the Air France crash.
In fact, Mr Cardoso admitted later, they were nothing more than sea 'trash' - probably from a ship, as was a big oil patch originally described as a fuel slick from the French jet.
Several Brazilian navy vessels are looking for debris from the plane, including a seat and a big chunk of what appeared to be fuselage, sighted by air force aircraft on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Defence Minister Nelson Jobim has said there is 'no doubt' that the debris spotted from the air came from flight AF 477, and that they marked the area close to where the plane hit the ocean.
The French government, which is in charge of the probe into the crash, has sent investigators to Brazil to inspect any debris that could be recovered from the zone, around 1,000km off-shore, and take them back to France.
Speculation over what caused the accident has ranged from a massive, lightning storm in the area at the time, to turbulence, to pilot error or a combination of factors.
No mayday call was received from the plane, only a series of data transmissions signalling it had lost power and then had either broken up or gone into a fatal dive.
Memorial services were held Wednesday in Paris and yesterday in Rio for those on board the plane, though no bodies have been spotted at sea.
